Continuum is made for a smarter audience. Canadians.
12 Monkeys..tv show
- Thread starter SiddFinch1
- Start date
LOVE Continuum, discovered it on Netflix, halfway through Season 2 right now!
Saw 3rd episode....so far its okay..not captivating but okay..will keep watching to see where it goes
That was a good one.
Is it just me or does The Palid Man (the 12 Monkey guy who keeps popping up) seem to be not normal?
I liked getting to see more of what Cassandra went through between her encounters with Cole. You gotta feel sorry for her, even though she knows what she's saying is true, she looks totally nuts.
Is it just me or does The Palid Man (the 12 Monkey guy who keeps popping up) seem to be not normal?
I liked getting to see more of what Cassandra went through between her encounters with Cole. You gotta feel sorry for her, even though she knows what she's saying is true, she looks totally nuts.
Agree.
Making her a true believer in the pilot was a mistake.
Finally caught up with this on Hulu, after hearing positive reviews for it. It's okay, but it could be better. I kinda like the Moffatesque approach of depicting Cole's experiences out of order, as it were, due to his jumping around the timeline; but there are some corny contrivances to it too, like the whole "solar flares can make you jump around" thing that didn't really amount to anything, or the way in this week's episode he just conveniently happened to accidentally jump back 2 days exactly when it was most necessary. That's a perennial and cliched conceit of time-travel episodes -- that the most awful and disastrous things always happen to the main characters at exactly the one time that they have an opportunity to go back in time and change it. (Of course, Seven Days based its entire premise on this, and it got very contrived how many huge disasters kept happening on a weekly basis. If life had been that dangerous before they had time travel, civilization would never have survived!)
The least effective part is the casting. Aaron Stanford is bland and unsympathetic; by all rights, they should've cast Kirk Acevedo as Cole rather than Cole's sidekick, because not only is he a much more compelling actor, but he resembles Bruce Willis a lot more. Amanda Schull is very pretty, reminding me of Emily Bett Rickards, but doesn't have Rickards's charisma. She's pleasant enough, but neither of the leads really stands out from the pack.
So I guess I'm not sure what I think of the show yet. I'm more curious about it than really liking it.
The least effective part is the casting. Aaron Stanford is bland and unsympathetic; by all rights, they should've cast Kirk Acevedo as Cole rather than Cole's sidekick, because not only is he a much more compelling actor, but he resembles Bruce Willis a lot more. Amanda Schull is very pretty, reminding me of Emily Bett Rickards, but doesn't have Rickards's charisma. She's pleasant enough, but neither of the leads really stands out from the pack.
So I guess I'm not sure what I think of the show yet. I'm more curious about it than really liking it.
^It would've been a lot more daring and a lot less cliched if they had stranded him permanently. But then we wouldn't have had Kirk Acevedo anymore.
Dr. Funkenstein
Lieutenant Commander
What?
Getting stranded in the past is far more cliche than having a jaunt back and forth. Several recent time travel stories have been like that. Continuum being a noteworthy example.
Getting stranded in the past is far more cliche than having a jaunt back and forth. Several recent time travel stories have been like that. Continuum being a noteworthy example.
Time travel is supposed to change things?
He didn't change ####.
The girl called out to him, and he told the scavengers about the tunnels.
Time as he experienced originally already had a second him in it that he didn't notice the "first" time around.
It seems to be very hard to change time if you're not actually sneaking up on it.
Every time Cole returns, the future is always the same which means that he is making no changes.
He didn't change ####.
The girl called out to him, and he told the scavengers about the tunnels.
Time as he experienced originally already had a second him in it that he didn't notice the "first" time around.
It seems to be very hard to change time if you're not actually sneaking up on it.
Every time Cole returns, the future is always the same which means that he is making no changes.
The cliche, as I referred to above, is getting a convenient time-travel reset button at the exact time when it's most desperately needed. He's never been able to do such a short hop before, and the one time he gets to do it is precisely the time when it works in his favor. That's a huge contrivance, and it's a contrivance used in a lot of other sci-fi. For instance, ST:TNG's "Cause and Effect," where the Enterprise is actually destroyed, but luckily it happens to get destroyed while it's in the middle of a time loop so the destruction can be undone. Ditto in "Timescape" in the same series -- an accident blows up the ship, but it's a timey-wimey explosion so it rewinds and the characters get to avert it. I think it happened once or twice in Stargate too -- utter disaster striking at exactly the moment when the characters were conveniently granted a temporal reset by sheer luck.
And the difference from Continuum is that that show started out with its lead stuck in the past. This show started out with the lead jumping back and forth, so if it had made a major alteration in its format in just the fourth episode, that would've been a pretty daring move to make.
MAYBE daring...but also would have been more riveting as a season finale. We would have been guessing during the interim if everyone in the future died or not.
And since it's the first season, there wouldn't have been news or rumors leaked about a major shake up. Just for an instant, i thought it would have changed the game, but because it was so early (not even a mid-season finale), i was kinda thinking there'd be a reset...or in this case, a distortion of our assumptions
One of my favourite moments in Quantum Leap was when Al died in the 1950s, and since a dead man can't be Sam's observer... A prim and proper Roddy McDowell retroactively took over since before the series started.
Roddy died in 1998.
Did not know that.
Sad.
Roddy died in 1998.
Did not know that.
Sad.
At first I thought Jones had lied to him and had actually sent him back 2 days on purpose, but she never said anything, so guess not.
I suppose the two-day, local jump could sort of be rationalized if you assume that how far you travel through space and time is proportional to the power employed by the machine. If the machine was damaged and the power fizzled out right at the start of the transfer, maybe it was only able to "push" him a slight spatiotemporal distance away. I'm wary of that explanation, though, since up to now the time jumps have been portrayed as covering a timespan independent of the amount of power used -- like jumping back to North Korea in the '80s (or whenever that was) when he was aimed for the US in 2015. If a slight glitch in the machine could produce such a major discrepancy, that argues against a linear relationship between the power and the size of the jump.
^This
Neither lead is keeping me interested, despite the girl being pretty. The guy has nothing to empathize with. He doesn't even seem like he's personally invested, which is a huge divergence from the film. I agree that Acevedo would've been a much better choice for Cole. He also has an innate ability to express something from the Bruce Willis portrayal, which Stanford does not, and imho is entirely necessary..... fear. Desperate, ravaged, almost maniacal, like someone who'd been living in the worst of penal conditions. Bruce Willis reveling in the sheer magnificence of breathing our AIR. That level of alienation
Frankly, what I'm not getting from this interpretation is WHY? Why these people 30 years in the future would intend to eliminate their own time line, & possibly their very existences, to save 7 billion people who died decades ago, which wasn't even the original concept. It was never about saving the 7 billion and undoing their own world. It was about gaining knowledge that they could use to regain control of the world they live in.
Trying to calculate how best to undo your own reality is a ridiculous notion. Trying to use the only avenue at your disposal to save your world by flirting with undoing your reality is very compelling, but we don't have that here. We have a basic post-apocalypse, where conditions are tough, but nothing compared to the grim horror of what the movie displayed, which drives them to tangle in their own past
In the movie version I get why they're risking it. They live like rats, imprisoning masses of their population, likely just to keep them under control. They're quarantined from the surface. It's their only hope, finding some bit of information in the past, that could help them free themselves, but it is a huge risk to all their existences, such that they won't even let Cole stay. They can't afford that loose thread
THIS Cole? I've yet to see anything about him that supports why he'd ultimately be suicidal enough to erase himself, least of all from the actor's performance, let alone be able to get in with a bunch of other people who want the same thing
I just don't get it.
The TV future is not as ####ed up as the movie Future.
A surface full of immune ass####s killing each other for resources is... Samey?
Was the movie about creating immunity?
I guess it was.
Even if the Scientists did that, they didn't have the numbers to repopulate, so what was the point unless they also had a massive, and I mean massive stock pile of embryos, that could be immunized which is beside the point since all the scientists in charge were frauds.
Frauds don't have plans, or if they do have plans, those plans never reach a pleasant conclusion for anyone else except the Frauds.
A surface full of immune ass####s killing each other for resources is... Samey?
Was the movie about creating immunity?
I guess it was.
Even if the Scientists did that, they didn't have the numbers to repopulate, so what was the point unless they also had a massive, and I mean massive stock pile of embryos, that could be immunized which is beside the point since all the scientists in charge were frauds.
Frauds don't have plans, or if they do have plans, those plans never reach a pleasant conclusion for anyone else except the Frauds.
Yes, but for a weekly series, you need a more flexible approach to time. It makes sense to use a model where history is mutable -- although so far they've been sticking pretty much to self-consistent time loops.
I think this past episode made it clear that conditions in the time travel base are much, much better than they are for everyone else. Besides, if the population is low enough, it might not be a stable breeding base for restoring humanity, especially with the death rate high due to the collapse of civilization and the activities of thugs like Deacon.
One thing Stanford does have in his favor in this regard is a sense of emotional deadness. I can buy him as someone who's just given up on life and doesn't much care what happens to him. It's not much, but it's something.
Similar threads
